The Orpheum Theatre Group decided not to include the 1939 movie about a plantation in the Civil War-era South in its 2018 Summer Movie Series after feedback from patrons following the last screening Aug. 11.

“As an organization whose stated mission is to ‘entertain, educate and enlighten the communities it serves’, the Orpheum cannot show a film that is insensitive to a large segment of its local population,” the theater’s operators said in a statement.

…The historic theater in Downtown Memphis has shown the movie for decades, but this year’s event “generated numerous comments,” leading to the decision.

“While title selections for the series are typically made in the spring of each year, the Orpheum has made this determination early in response to specific inquiries from patrons,” the Orpheum group said.

This move is nearly as disturbing to me as the cancellation of the Egypt-themed fraternity party. Gone with the Wind was my favorite film in my early teen years (right after 1963’s Cleopatra). The book by Margaret Mitchell is one of the few I have read multiple times.

The movie is so much more than a race-based saga. Unfortunately, in today’s progressive fire and fury to tear down American icons, this film has become the celluloid equivalent of a Robert E. Lee statue.

As posted on the Orpheum’s Facebook page event for the August screening, one user called the film “racist.” Another remarked over news of the canceled screening, “slowly but surely, we will rid this community of all tributes to white supremacy.”

While the self-righteous, racialist social justice thugs pat themselves on the back for this “victory”, a glace at social media shows that the theater’s move is very unpopular with regular Americans.

I like “Gone with the Wind,” and frankly I don’t give a damn about those offended by it.

Additionally this move dishonors the first black actor/actress to receive an Academy Award: Hattie McDaniel.

If a young, African-American audience isn’t allowed to see McDaniel’s performance, then they are missing the opportunity to understand a critical part of cultural history and will not appreciate exactly how far we have come as a nation since 1939.

I don’t believe this is a problem that can be solved by government. It’s going to require people to “put their foot down.” To call out this nonsense when they see it or hear it. To shame and ridicule and mock the perpetrators of it and those that coddle and enable them. To humiliate them relentlessly until they recede from the public square.

It’s already happened and most younger people are not even aware of it. Maybe some of you remember the old movie “Song of the South” about Brer Fox and Brer Rabbit? The tar baby? “Zip pah dee doo dah”? Well, Disney pulled it way back because it had slaves in it. Of course, we are not supposed to enjoy anything that had slaves in it. That means Cleopatra, or any Egyptian movie or any other movie that might have a slave in it. If we ignore the slavery issue and not see any movies with it in them then the issue will go away. Not! This is truly the tail wagging the dog if ever there was such a case.

Leslie Eastman: It comes right after the part that Scarlett was going to be raped

That’s right. The KKK were the good guys.

It was a big ragged white man and a squat black negro with shoulders and chest like a gorilla. Swiftly she flapped the reins on the horse’s back and clutched the pistol. The horse started to trot and suddenly shied as the white man threw up his hand.

“Of course, Mr. Kennedy is in the Klan and Ashley, too, and all the men we know,” cried India. “They are men, aren’t they? And white men and Southerners. You should have been proud of him instead of making him sneak out as though it were something shameful and–“

Not only do you think Southern white women deserve to be raped, I venture to guess your are a minion of George Soros targeting the more popular conservative blogs with your racialist inanity. How much have you gotten for this series of KKK references, in an attempt to make a classic, popular tale of passion and romance into an homage to the KKK? 50$? 100$? Did Team Soros hire you from Craigslist?

Zachriel: Two can play this game…except I have to actually to real work and raise a family, instead of spread racialist smears across the comments sections of popular blogs.

I doubt you are doing this for “free”. Did you get a nonsense degree, and can’t make an adequate living, so you get paid to make a classic American movie into some sort of salute to Jim Crow?

You have oodles of time to come onto our site, and offer nothing more than leftist insults and derisions that come right out of the Soros handbook. So, I am not inclined to believe anything in regards to your motivation for being here.

Furthermore, from your remarks, I take it that you think every illegal, immoral, and corrupt act perpetrated during Reconstruction was jut fine. The South had it coming to them…and they still deserve whatever race-baiting miscreants dish out today.

Zachriel: You offer a bunch of non-sequitors to smear a post, then accuse me of fighting strawmen.

ROFL.

So, here is what we know about you based on today’s dialog:

1) You think its aces to rape Southern white women…because slavery. They do not merit defending.

2) You think the South deserves everything it gets, in term of racialist hate and brutality. The South will never be forgiven for its past in your book, and as far as progressives are concerned.

3) You are so unimaginative, you take all your arguments straight up from the Soros Handbook of leftist tactics. That is, if regular Americans love something, it must be classified as “fascist” or “racist” and supporters are clearly Nazis or KKK members.

4) Your comments show evidence of being from multiple people (like using the word “we” in replies), showing that you all probably are nothing more than the AntiFa-computer division funded by George Soros. “Zachriel” is a fake name, rather like the black masks AntiFa agitators wear in real life. In fact…reflecting upon your commenting presence, “Zachriel” appears to show up about the same time AntiFa started its insanity.

5) Your team obviously doesn’t like black people, because you want to tear-down the movie that featured the first African American Academy.

6) Your assertions about strawmen are projections, for your comments have enough to feed a herd of cows and a stable of horses for centuries.

Actually, we repudiated that position, so it means you either are not listening, or are not able to listen.

Leslie Eastman: They do not merit defending.

Protection of the purity of the white race was certainly a motivating force for the KKK and other segregationists. It provided cover for the among the worst atrocities of the period.

Leslie Eastman: 2) You think the South deserves everything it gets, in term of racialist hate and brutality. The South will never be forgiven for its past in your book, and as far as progressives are concerned.

We repudiate that position as well. The South was largely forgiven for slavery and insurrection.

Leslie Eastman: if regular Americans love something, it must be classified as “fascist” or “racist” and supporters are clearly Nazis or KKK members.

Do you disagree that Gone With the Wind depicts the KKK as the good guys?

For me, watching “Gone With the Wind” is like watching a story about an American Indian fighting the US Calvary or a new movie called “Land Mine” about young German soldiers who have been captured and are made to remove land mines that their fellow soldiers had planted in Belgium during the war. You can feel empathy or even the desire to see them succeed just like in the GWTW movie. In the movie, it is easy to want to see the O’Hara’s succeed and survive the terrible war. That doesn’t mean you like the KKK or in the German movie that you like the Nazi’s. They are MOVIES! Get over it!

Don’t get too overheated. The Empire’s not going to fall because a movie chain made a sensible business decision.

The chain is in the business of selling movie tickets, and that’s all. Management doesn’t want to have to deal with rioters, vandals, or protesters driving away paying customers and increasing their insurance costs. They’re all paid to show movies, popcorn, and Raisinets, not to make courageous stands.

Local governments, schools and colleges, and police forces allowing statues, monuments, and murals to be defaced or destroyed is a different matter. They should oppose that with a bit more determination than they’ve shown to date.

As for Gone with the Wind itself, well, they can’t watch Hattie McDaniel as Mammy without also seeing Butterfly McQueen as the goofy maid Prissy … maybe that’s the problem.

The Cultural Revolution comes to America, courtesy of the jackbooted, totalitarian Left.

San Francisco mayor Ed Lee already made a public statement in which he unabashedly (and, very foolishly) boasted of the city’s right to engage in blatant viewpoint discrimination against groups seeking the right to rally in public, saying, in so many words, that if one wants the privilege of speaking in San Francisco, one must espouse the “right” kind of views, in order to be granted the privilege.

Of course the movie is insensitive. Scarlett O”Hara, the focal character, was vastly insensitive to anything but her own self. She was so self-focused that she did not respect the marriage of her “best” friend, or notice that the man was in love with, and better suited to, her friend! How could she possibly notice anything pertinent about the family servants?

Not racially sensitive? Gee, that’s too bad.
Twenty years ago, when I went to see a re-release in the theater, there was the warning “contains scenes of marital rape”.
So, you see, the angry people of color have finally caught up with the bitter, angry women.

This movie has always said more about 1939 than about 1864. Just as 1950s science fiction inevitably says more about the 1950s than about what was then the far future.

BUT if you censor everything from the past that does not meet contemporary racial sensitivity standards you’ll have nothing left to read or watch other than insipid contemporary fiction (hello, Disney!) that’s been carefully written and produced to offend no one.

Judging the past by contemporary standards is profoundly anachronistic (nor would much of contemporary culture pass muster by the standards of 1939). The past (it’s been said is a foreign place; people did things differently there.

Nonetheless those who lived there were as human as we, and we have much to lose by simply flushing everything they did or wrote or filmed down the memory hole. It’s almost as if our modern sans-culottes are determined to declare a Year Zero from which everything must be created de novo, ex nihilo. And how did that work out the last time it was tried?

This is what we lose when we erase our history. If we don’t remember Calhoun or Davis or Lee, how can we appreciate the courage and morality of Frederick Douglass, Rosa Parks or Martin Luther King, Jr., or what Hattie McDaniel and Bill Robinson meant to a generation of African Americans still living under Jim Crow?

I am no fan no fan of the Confederacy, and honoring someone like Nathan Bedford Forrest makes me uncomfortable. But to erase all that makes it impossible to come to grips with what slavery was and how hard it was to extirpate it and its residue… and the hard work of those who did so.

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